Tech Table: Adhesives

The bonding of aerostructures is becoming increasingly important as airframers seek solutions for next-generation aircraft that enable increased lightweighting. The ability to assemble and unitize structures and minimize use of mechanical fasteners is critical to efficient, high-rate commercial aircraft manufacturing. That said, bond application control and bond quality assurance are still maturing, and thus have not yet supplanted mechanical fasteners in aircraft assembly.

Still, manufacturers have brought to market a wide array of adhesives designed to mate structures of all types of materials, including metal and composite laminates and honeycomb cores. This is the first of a series of Tech Tables that CW will publish in 2020, each designed to provide as comprehensive a list as possible of suppliers, their products and selected product specifications.

This table of aerospace structural adhesives, which includes film and paste adhesives, was built with data provided by suppliers. It should be noted that not all of the same data were provided for each adhesive by each supplier. Further, each supplier conducts different tests to characterize the adhesive; one test, however, was conducted more than others, and that is the single lap shear test, also known as ASTM D 1002. Based on data CW received, most of the single lap shear strength data were derived from tests with metallic adherends, or the adherend was not specified at all. A minority of single lap shear strength data were derived from tests with composite adherends.

Download a PDF of the adhesives Tech Table as it appears in the January 2020 issue of CompositesWorld: Tech Table: Adhesives.

Look for two more Tech Tables in 2020: Mold release agents (July issue) and compression molding machines (December issue).